Swing, Batter, Batter, Swing!

A few months ago, Cam was invited to join his battery's softball team and compete in the Ft. Bliss Softball Tournament throughout the summer. He has been spending several nights a week swinging some wood/aluminum and playing in the dirt against other Army teams.

The A-4 THAAD Battery guys have been doing pretty well each week and have only been blown-out (i.e. mercy rule was in effect) once. Most recently, Cam has been behind the plate playing Catcher. He has the cleat bruises on his knee to prove his competitiveness - heaven forbid anyone tries to slide home, because there will be a former offensive lineman blocking the plate! He's also been improving his batting average and has driven in several runs in the last few games.

I recently drug my bum out to some of the games and enjoyed cheering on our team, while chatting with some wives of the other teams.

Here are a few shots of the guys in action:

A-4 warms up before the game
Cam (2nd from the right in the background) is behind the guy in white shirt and shorts

Playing Catcher

Line Drive!

Dash for 2nd

The next game will be a Saturday tournament against some local employees of Wells Fargo. Let's hope our guys can put on a good show against the civilians!

Home Improvements, Stage 4 (and final ... for a while)

Some of Cam's Block Leave was spent finishing up various Home Improvement activities around the house. Our list keeps getting longer, but we've prioritized some things that need to be done before the Big Arrival in October.

In the last two weeks, Cam has completed all of our interior painting, he hung photos and pictures, he rearranged furniture, AND he cleaned and organized the garage.

No more white walls for us! Every room in the house is now painted (except for the Laundry Room and the closets). We chose calming blue colors for our bedroom and bathroom. The blues came from a mountain painting we inherited from Cam's parents and turned out to match the mountain posters we've had since college.

We used the same two blues and decided to go with a beach theme in our bathroom and now have a calming view to look at while we soak in our big bathtub!


The last room to be painted was the Office/Craft Room/new Guest Room. We HAD to have a WSU Cougar room somewhere in the house! There are still pictures waiting to be framed and hung, but there is definitely the Wazzu theme being rocked!

Cam also worked on organizing the garage and can now park his truck back in there. He built himself a workbench for his chop-saw and circular saw without managing to damage any appendages. (Sorry, Tim!)

Needless to say, he was a very busy boy, but our house looks so much better for it! Good work, Hubby! You're the best!!!

White Sands National Monument

On our way home from Ruidoso, NM, we decided to stop off at the White Sands National Monument - just to say we'd finally been to see the white sand. The White Sands National Monument is the world's largest gypsum dune field. It is a 275-square-mile area of great wave-like dunes of pure-white gypsum in the middle desert and can be seen from the highway about 60 miles away. The gypsum comes from the western portion of the monument where a lake with a very high mineral content, evaporates and leaves behind gypsum deposits that are then wind-transported to form the white dunes. Some of the dunes move at a rate of up to 30 feet per year!

Driving through the fields to get to the big dunes reminded us a lot of driving through a snowy Washington mountain pass - especially seeing the 6 foot high piles of sand on either side of the road and following the guy plowing the access road (be it on a road grader as opposed to a snow plow).

We hiked up a dune or two, only to discover the sand was cool to the touch (even to our bare feet!) and nothing like beach sand that's sat in the sun all day in 90+ degree temperatures. Also reminding us of snow were the kids sledding down the dunes on sleds you could rent from the gift shop.

Athena had a blast digging in the sand and had us covered from head to toe before it was time to get back into the truck.

It was a wonderful side-trip on our way home and we can't wait to bring our next visitors up to see the sights!

***P.S. If you click on the photos, you can see bigger images. Just remember to hit the "Back" button to come back to our blog.***

Road Trip to Ruidoso, NM

Instead of spending the entire two weeks of Cam's Block Leave doing Home Improvement activities (see later post) and hanging around sweltering El Paso, we decided to escape town for a few days. We headed north to the southern/central New Mexico town of Ruidoso. We had been promised, by several of our local friends, that the Ruidoso area would be the cure for all our tree-withdrawal symptoms. So, we packed up the truck, grabbed the dog and made the two and a half hour drive north.

Ruidoso did not disappoint. Its rolling mountains and hills were covered with Ponderosa Pines, various deciduous trees and green grass! There were streams and lakes, cute little "yuppie" and ski shops to peruse, and many, many, many cabins to stay in. (Too bad we chose one over the internet that turned out to be so "quaint" that it had newspaper taped to cracks in the windows...)

During our three days in town, we went for a nice, leisurely hike in the Lincoln Forest. It was glorious to be in the woods again and hear the stream babbling away as we walked. We also found out that despite her lack of enthusiasm for sprinklers, kiddie-pools and baths, Athena IS a true water dog. She happily went splashing through the creek we had to cross over/through several times, stopping only to bite at the rushing water. She also loved being able to find all kinds of new plants to sniff and even found a little garter snake to chase.

While out in the Lincoln National Forest, we stopped at the Monjeau Lookout, an active Forest Service fire lookout tower. It was completed in 1940, sits at 9640 feet in elevation and provides a gorgeous 360 degree view of 160 square miles of forest land.

We spent the rest of our "vacation" window shopping, trying new restaurants in town and just relaxing. We also took a walk in a local park where Athena found her first official stick ... from a tree!

It was a lovely short getaway and reintroduced a little green into our rather dull, brown desert lives!

Clean Bill of Health

After a month of daily spot shampooing and medicine application and two additional trips to the vet for skin scrapings, Athena has been given a clean bill of health!

It appears that we caught the Demodectic Mange problem in time and successfully combated it! We're just thankful the process was relatively painless for us AND Athena and didn't require the MONTHS of treatment that the vet had warned us about.

So, good-bye mangy mutt! Hello, normal, happy puppy!

BEFORE

AFTER
Enjoying her first "actual" stick in a Ruidoso, NM park